Rupert Murdoch, the chair of News International, has made much play about how he intends to put all his online newspapers behind a paywall. He believes he can change the culture of "free" on the internet, and operate an online "gatekeeping" service on the same lines as he operates his off-line news empire. He cites the success of the Wall Street Journal's subscription model as the template for his other newspapers to follow.

I'll leave to others to argue about whether old Rupe is tilting at windmills and whether this model is financially sustainable. This article is more about whether News Corporation employs people who have the basic technical know-how to make pay-walls work.

Because you see, as of the time of writing this article (9th November 2009), you can read the Wall Street Journal free, despite it's pay-wall.

Here's how:

When you go to the Wall Street Journal homepage, you see a series of key symbols next to articles, which indicate they are subscriber only articles (in the image above they are circled in red).

As you can see, the headline article today was "Kraft Makes Hostile Bid for Cadbury" and this article is subscriber only. If you click on it, you get a short excerpt and are advised that to read more, you need to subscribe (see the screenshot below) - the title on the article page is a little different to that quoted on the home page.

To read the WSJ article for free, simply open another tab in your brower, call up Google, copy and paste the title of the article into the search box and press enter.

This brings up two versions of the article in the search results, from five hours ago and eleven hours ago - see the image below:

If you click on either link, it loads up the full article which you can read without subscribing. See the image below.

People who pay to read the Wall Street Journal = People who don't know how to Google. Very few people on the planet I imagine.

No doubt Mr Murdoch will blame Google for this. Methinks the fault lies with Rupe himself for not paying for competant webmasters who really know how to erect paywalls and password protect material.

I'm pretty sure he'll get his people to fix things shortly, but in the meanwhile, readers should enjoy the content while it lasts. If the paywall on the WSJ has so many basic flaws, can Murdoch ever really manage to implement paywalls across his network of sites?